Hello Steve,
On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 04:18:47PM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > Sorry for wasting your bandwidth on the broken iso. I'll post again as
> > soon as I have 2.4.26 working in d-i.
>
> The busybox maintainer has kindly provided an updated udeb that supports
> modules generated by the latest binutils. The images at
> http://people.debian.org/~vorlon/fixed-alpha-kernels/ have been updated
> as well, and verified to work. Note that the only kernels available in
> the archive to be installed are still broken, so you can only use this
> for testing the new kernels, not really for installing a usable system
> sarge system.
I tried out the ISO. Maybe even though it was broken, you can get
some (general?) conclusions out of it. I will the updated iso
tomorrow (sorry, my RW-disk is at home) and tell you on Wednesday
additional issues, especially how the kernel behaved. I was able to
boot and to use the "old" iso until I had to choose a NIC on my LX
(which has both IDE and SCSI drives).
* Please turn IDE-DMA off by default, at least for installs. On my alpha
I see tons of scary messages, and trying to use the IDE drives fails
(on installed kernels), c.f. #241185 for details. Since for many alphas
IDE-support is very poor (hardware-wise), I think keeping it off during
installs is wise. Maybe the installer could ask/guess later on, if DMA
should be attempted. Or it should always add "ide=nodma" in /etc/aboot.conf
and an installation note should inform the user that (s)he can remove it.
* Any NIC I chose results in a printed "Segmentation fault". I did not expect
it to actually find any NIC, since my old one was doing strange things
and a 3c509B I got is not recognized in my alpha (neither Jumpstart (2.2
based), nor 2.4.21-pre1, nor 2.4.26). After the segfault, the hardware
detection bar is shown briefly, and I am again at the choosing NIC
selection.
* Detect NIC-Hardware is not available in german (or switching did not work).
I currently do some test installs on my ibook (ppc) as well, where all
screens are in german. If you can point me to the proper .po-files, I can
translate them.
* I see that the list of modules is quite limited. Since no aic7xxx is
available on this ISO, I was unable to test if the aic7xxx-fix has gone
in. I think aic7xxx should be included (if the fix is available, of course).
These missing modules were also seen in the log (by hw-detect).
(Update when sending: Was the module left out on purpose?)
* Due to my NIC-troubles I tried out Firewire (I got an USB/Firewire card
about 1.5 years ago). In 2.4.21 I had troubles using ethernet over firewire,
but in 2.4.26 it worked flawlessly. Please consider adding eth1394 (and
ohci1394, which needs to be loaded as well) in the NIC-Dialog. After insmodding
these modules, the interface behaves exactly like a NIC. As I read, though,
only connections via Linux-boxes are supported. This could be noted in the
install logs. I think it would be cool having Linux be able to install
over Firewire, and given that the support is so trivial to add.
0000:01:05.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB22/A IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 24
Memory at 0000000009006000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2K]
Memory at 0000000009000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
* Since, as in my case, no NIC-Driver was able to load (and also none was
found automatically, as expected), there should be an option to stop
the installation on that screen. Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del works, of course.
Thanks for your efforts getting d-i in shape on alpha
Helge
--
Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. Helge.Kreutzmann@itp.uni-hannover.de
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